Spamming Legality Issues - Essay Example

The paper "The Real Cost of Spam" is an outstanding example of an essay on information technology. In recent years, more people are using the internet in their daily life either for their jobs or personal purposes. With the massive growth in the number of the internet users, cybercrime issues have been taken more seriously by people and governments as well, which leads some countries to issue new regulations in order to reduce the harm that spamming cause to internet users. The first country that issued regulations on email use was the U.S.A.

, implementing the CAN-SPAM Act in 2003. CAN-SPAM stands for "Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing." The Act was activated in January 2004 to set out regulations and requirements for sending commercial emails, establishing penalties for spammers, and giving the email user reviving spam right to ask e-mailers to stop spamming them. The law covers emails that are used mainly to advertise a product, service or a website.  Personal emails are not covered under this law, as well as any type of “relationship messages,” which are emails that update customers on an existing business relationship.

These acts were not considered as spam although they are used to advertise a product or a service because receivers of such emails agreed on giving their emails in order to start a relationship with the business. Although CAN-SPAM Act was the first Act to regulate email use in such a detailed way, it was not the last; many other countries followed the United States by issuing Acts to reduce spam. For example, the European Union followed the United States by issuing a “Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications,” which regulates spamming and cybercrime in general.

Another important Act issued by a country to fight spam was Canadas Anti-Spam Legislation, which was passed in December 2010. It became effective on July 1, 2014, to protect Canadians and to ensure that business continues growing and competing in the global market place. The new law generally prohibits the: 1- Sending of commercial messages without the recipient's permission, including emails, social networks accounts, or text messages sent to a cell phone. 2- Modification of transmission data in an electronic message, which results in delivering messages to the wrong destination.

3- Installing computer software without the permission of the computer owner. 4- The use of false or misleading representations online in order to promote a product or a service. 5- Accessing computer systems in order to collect personal information. 6- The use of computer programs to collect electronic addresses without permission. (fightspam.gc.ca) Cost One of the major issues when discussing the effect of spamming on internet user is the cost. Spamming cost about 20 billion dollars a year, which is spent on fending off an unwanted email (spam).

Although there is a huge amount of money spent on fighting spamming, the real profit the spammers get is much less compared to what is spent on fighting it. Spammers pitching goods via spam earn about $200 million annually, compared to 20 billion spent on fighting spamming, which makes the ratio of cost (to society) to benefit (to miscreants), 100:1, is much higher than that for many other kinds of commercial crime. The cost of spam is based on a few categories spamming impact on and cause financial damage in each of these categories.

The first category is Anti-Spam Technology. Spam-fighting software and services are a huge business in the marketplace today. Companies and business are spending thousands of dollars on anti-spam solutions every year to ensure reduced harm caused by spamming (Edwards, 2014). The second category, spamming affects Productivity. Spam causes loss of productively and this accrues by wasting employees’ time. According to Nucleus Research, “the average employee spends 16 seconds reviewing and deleting each spam message” (Edwards, 2014, Para 4).

Businesses that quarantine spam each user spends an average of 4.5 minutes per week reviewing and deleting messages. All that loss of productivity adds to the overall cost of spam, which justifies the huge cost of spam (Edwards, 2014). The third category that adds to spamming is the cost of Wasted Storage. Companies that quarantine spam (where junk messages are placed in a directory for review and confirmation by recipients) must enhance their storage capacity, which adds cost to companies (Edwards, 2014).

The fourth category where spamming impacts on is Internet Service Cost Pass-Alongs (Edwards, 2014). When spammers keep sending spam to the internet user, it increases the traffic in the ISP’S networks, which forces ISPs to add extra network and server capacity in order to handle the traffic (Edwards, 2014). The last category where spamming causes finical damage is the An Intangible Cost, which is spamming impacting on the economy, and businesses around the world (Edwards, 2014). Spamming hit many businesses and economies around the world and it can be very harmful to businesses and nations that are least able to bear the burden (itsecurity.com).